No
artist has had a greater influence in imagining and
realizing the artistic potential of video and television
than Korean-born Nam June Paik. Through a vast array of
installations, videotapes, global television productions,
films, and performances, Paik has reshaped our
perceptions of the temporal image in contemporary art.
The Worlds of Nam June Paik transforms the
Guggenheim Museum into a celebration of the moving image
and an appreciation of Paik's impact on the art of the
late-twentieth century.

Video
Commune, a Web site created for the occasion by
Electronic Arts Intermix and the Guggenheim Museum, draws
from EAI's extensive documentation of Paik's
single-channel videotapes to present an interactive view
of his collaborations with other artists, dancers, and
musicians.

This exhibition is sponsored by

The commissioning and
production of the site-specific works in the rotunda,
Sweet and Sublime and Jacob's Ladder, are
made possible by The Bohen FoundationAdditional support is provided by The
Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for
the Arts

Top: Nam June Paik in
collaboration with Norman Ballard, Paul Garrin, David
Hartnett, and Stephen Vitiello, Modulation in
Sync, 2000. Three-channel video and stereo sound
installation with 100 monitors, seven projectors, two
lasers, water, mirrors, projection screens, and metal
structure, variable dimensions. Installation view at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1999; test for
The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Commissioning and
production of the fully realized works Sweet and
Sublime and Jacob's Ladder made possible by
The Bohen Foundation. Photo by David Heald.

Paik studied music composition first
in Korea, then at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote
his thesis on Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. In
1956 Paik traveled to Europe and settled in Germany to
pursue his interest in avant-garde music and performance.
During studies at the Summer Course for New Music in
Darmstaat in 1958, he met composer John Cage. Cage's
ideas on composition and performance were a great
influence on Paik, as were those of George Maciunas, the
founder of the radical art movement Fluxus, which Paik
was invited to join.

Paik's initial artistic explorations of the
mass media of television were presented in his first solo
exhibition in 1963, Exposition of
MusicElectronic Television, at the Galerie
Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. This milestone exhibition
featured Paikís prepared televisions. Paik altered
the sets to distort their reception of broadcast
transmissions and scattered them about the room, on their
sides and upside down. He also created interactive video
works that transformed the viewers' relationship to the
medium. With these first steps began an astonishing
effusion of ideas and invention that over the next 30
years would play a profound role in the introduction and
acceptance of the electronic moving image into the realm
of art.

Nam June Paik, 1986. Photo by Rainer
Rosenow.

In 1964 Paik moved to New York and continued his
explorations of television and video, and, by the late
1960s, was at the forefront of a new generation of artists
creating an aesthetic discourse out of television and the
moving image. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Paik also
worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other
artists and working to realize the potential of the
emerging medium. Along with his remarkable sequence of
videotapes and projects for televisionfeaturing
collaborations with friends Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys,
David Bowie, Cage, and Merce Cunninghamhe created a
series of installations that fundamentally changed video
and redefined artistic practice.

The
presentation of the works in the High Gallery is made
possible by the generous support of Samsung
Electronics

At the center of The Worlds
of Nam June Paik is Modulation in Sync (2000),
which includes two laser installations created with
Norman Ballard for the museum rotunda that transform
Frank Lloyd Wrightís architecture into a dynamic
audiovisual space. Projected onto the rotunda oculus,
Sweet and Sublime is a rapidly changing display of
geometric shapes that echo Wrightís innovative
design. In Jacob's Ladder, laser projections pass
through a seven-story waterfall that cascades from the
top of the museum. On the rotunda floor, a cluster of
television monitors, with their screens facing up,
project a pulsing display of rapidly changing imagery.
Video projections along the ramp edges aimed towards the
center of the rotunda provide a visual link between the
images on the ground and those on the oculus, symbolizing
the connections between Paik's historical remaking of
video into an artist's medium and his latest
transformation of laser into a dramatic "postvideo"
treatment of energy and light.

The museum's High Gallery hosts
Paik's recently completed three-dimensional laser
sculptures, while the ramps feature Paikís
landmark installations and sculptural pieces. In works
such as Real Fish/Live Fish (1982), TV
Chair (1968), and Video Buddha (1976), the
artist employs videocameras and monitors to explore our
perceptions of both external objects and ourselves and to
create a profound sense of how we understand the world.
These works are arranged together with the
multiple-monitor installations Video Fish (1975),
TV Garden (1974), and TV Clock (1963), in
which Paik arrays rhetorical and aesthetic strategies to
dismantle customary ways of seeing. Specially installed
for this exhibition, such pioneering works take on
particular relevance to the prevalent use of video by
younger contemporary artists.

The museum's Tower Gallery
houses a selection of Paik's early works, including audio
and video recordings and key sculptural and interactive
works from the 1960s and early '70s. These early prepared
television and interactive video pieces, including
Magnet TV (1965) and Participation TV
(1963), offer a sophisticated, radical treatment of the
ways in which interactions with technology can yield new
visual experiences.

The Tower Gallery also features video and photo
documentation of Paik's early Fluxus performance work,
showing the connections between his performance art and
his later transformation of the medium of video. A
tribute to Charlotte Moorman, Paik's great collaborator
in performance, is also on view, including TV
Cello (1971), a transformation of the instrument
through video created especially for Moorman by Paik,
along with videos and photographs that celebrate their
unique artistic relationship. In addition, the Paik/Abe
Video Synthesizer (1969), one of the first artist-made
video image processors, is installed with a selection of
videotapes the artist produced with this innovative
technology. Adjacent to the gallery, a single-channel
screening room presents continuous showings of a
selection of Paik's videos and television productions
from the '60s to the present.

Nam June Paik's art and career
embody the virtues of change and recognize artís
powerful role in helping us understand the world as it
changes around us. The Worlds of Nam June Paik
reflects the scope of Paik's remarkable careerfrom
his transformation of broadcast television and video to
his reconfiguration of laser into a new form of
sculptural and installation art. His unique achievements,
the precedents set by his creative accomplishments, and
the wide range of his work attest to the key role Paik
has played in expanding our understanding and definition
of the arts through media. By inaugurating the millennium
with The Worlds of Nam June Paik, the Guggenheim
Museum not only acknowledges his importance but also
testifies to the extraordinary impact the moving image
will have on the art of the 21st century.

John G. Hanhardt, Senior
Curator of Film and Media Arts

The Worlds of Nam June Paikhas received additional funds from Korean
Cultural Service, Metropolis DVD, The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Swatch, the Barbara and
Howard Wise Endowment for the Arts, and
NASA